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Saturday, March 24, 2012

UP TO MY EYEBALLS

Well, I haven’t posted lately because I’ve been up to my
eyeballs in work! We spent most of the last month helping young adults finish their applications to BYU-Hawaii –
I know we helped complete at least 50 applications. To be scanned and faxed: high school transcripts, family financial
papers, recommendations from LDS Bishops and Stake Presidents (local and
regional leaders), letters of sponsorship from U.S. relatives, certification of English proficiency (from a
test we administer monthly), and applications for BYU’s version of work-study,
called IWORK. Ends up being about 12
papers per student. Add to that about 4
hours of typing in a second language - I’m
glad I’m not applying to college these days, because I don’t have the patience for it! Whew!

BUT, the surge is finished, and since BYU has no available
IWORK for this fall, most of our qualified applicants are going to be online
students to start off. The school here may
open one of its computer labs in the evenings, so young adults can use it to “attend”
their online classes. I can’t wait until
that happens, because already we have three and four people waiting on the two
available computers in our office. I
have to run someone out of the classroom where I teach in order to hold my own
classes from four to six in the evening!

The entrance to Liahona High School.

Jim is enjoying the chance to observe teachers, as they do
the version of student teaching we do here.
Even though most teachers here have four-year degrees, almost none of
them have degrees in education, so in come the Szokas (latest in a very long line of senior
missionaries) to act as adjunct professors for BYU-Hawaii, to teach these
college-level courses in education. But
since these teachers are already in the classroom, we tend to approach them as
graduate-level workshop classes, rather than “read the chapter and answer the
questions” undergraduate classes. Makes
the courses a lot more pragmatic when you can go back to your own classroom and
try something out.

Anyway, Jim has been thoroughly delighted with two
particular teachers he has observed. Kalo
(Kah-low), a math genius, is in her third year of teaching, and she is
remarkable already. Not perfect, but
every time Jim gives her a suggestion, she puts it into practice, and he sees
it the next several times he comes into the classroom. She has a better understanding of teaching,
both in theory and practice, after two and a quarter years, than I did after 12
years!

The other teacher, Makaleta (Mah-kah-lay-tah, the Tongan
version of Margaret), is simply incredible.
She has been a lab assistant for the past four years, and is serving as
a long-term substitute this year. But she
has applied everything she has learned in the classes she has taken here, and
both Jim and I feel we could recommend her to any school system in the
world. She teaches 9th grade
science, and here’s an example of her teaching:

In any
second-language situation, you want to use a lot of visual aids. Makaleta was teaching the concept of peristalsis,
in which the muscles of the esophagus contract downward in a pattern that moves
the food down to the stomach. So what
was her visual aid? Not a simple
picture, not something high tech – she put an apple inside a nylon sock, and
pushed it down little by little from behind the sock, while her students
watched the apple “magically” get pushed down.
Great demonstration! Even if her
students had a hard time pronouncing the word, they certainly understood what
it meant!

Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to
get a cow to fly, when the cow wasn't
designed to fly...knowhatImean?

Me, I’m having a roller-coaster ride helping classes of
teachers figure out how to teach. I go
from being impressed that a Seminary (LDS religion class) teacher decides to
try out reader’s theater to help her 9th grade English language
learners get past the archaic English used in the Old Testament, or being
amazed at the grasp of “hands on” activities a new automotive teacher has, even
to the point of having students create an active scenario about treating a
victim of electric shock (rather than just talking about the safety rules) to
being totally tickled and not a little wide-eyed when a new teacher writes in
his “reflecting on our practice” journal that he never considered sharing his vocabulary words with his
students. That makes me wonder what
he thought vocabulary words are for – are they classified information or
something? Hee hee.

Seriously, though, most of the teachers are making earnest
efforts to apply what they learn in these classes, and you have to be impressed
that someone with a business degree who decides to come back to Tonga to teach,
spends a couple of years taking classes after putting in a full day of
teaching, in order to satisfy the requirements the LDS Church has placed upon
them. That’s dedication. Now if I can just get them to recognize that
we have to teach BEYOND the year-end exams.
We need to teach skills which these teens will use for the rest of their
lives, skills like time and resource management, decision-making, problem-solving,
flexibility and self-direction – these are skills very absent in the
traditional Tongan culture, but the curriculum here at Liahona Middle School
and Liahona High School can be an effective vehicle for learning those skills. Hey, wish me luck – I dream big!

1 comment:

Wow! I'm impressed!! It sounds a lot harder to do this than I thought it was--would love to be a fly on the wall while you're teaching! It seems like your students are so motivated to learn and use their lessons, too! Gee, must be they have great educators...the best teachers I ever had always movivated me, and I still remember them and the lessons they taught. The Szokas will be legends in the Tongan people's stories for many generations!